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Canada offers climate change strategy
Canada will not meet its Kyoto targets to lower greenhouse gas emissions because of 10 years of inaction by the former Liberal government, but its new environmental legislation could serve as a template for the United States, China and India, Prime Minister Stephen Harper told a German business audience June 4.
Speaking in advance of the Group of Eight economic summit, he said that when his Conservative government took office at the start of 2006, Canada’s GHG emissions were 33 percent above the Kyoto target signed in 1997.
Meeting those targets would have been impossible “without crippling our economy.”
Instead Canada has turned to a strategy of intensity-based reductions on GHGs, forcing companies to cut emissions for each unit of production (a barrel of oil or thousand cubic feet of gas), without imposing absolute reductions that made no allowance for rising output, he said.
“There are elements of our plan that we believe could work not just for Canada, but for many countries in the world — including some of the large emitters that did not accept targets under the Kyoto protocol,” Harper said.
“It is urgent that we start work to develop a new universal consensus on how to prevent global warming,” he said.
Harper: reduction targets needed Harper said all countries “must embrace ambitious absolute reduction targets, so that the international Panel on Climate Change’s goal of cutting emissions in half by 2050 can be met.
“Of course, it may not be possible for all countries, or all industries and firms within all countries, to reduce their emissions by the same amount on the same time line,” he said.
The Canadian plan is forecast to lower GHGs by 20 percent from 2006 levels by 2020, but many European countries are already well ahead of the Kyoto goals, with Germany lowering its emissions by 18.4 percent as of 2004.
European nations are calling for a global reduction of 50 percent below 1990 levels and a new protocol to be administered under the United Nations.
The United States has proposed a meeting by the end of 2008 of major polluting companies to plan ways to bring down GHGs.
The extent of the challenge facing Canada is contained in Environment Canada’s latest numbers which show GHGs climbed from 677 million metric tons in 1997 to 747 million metric tons in 2004 and 2005.
To comply with Kyoto between 2008 and 2012 would require a dramatic decrease in GHGs to 563 million metric tons.
—Gary Park
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